Tagging enriched with controlled vocabularies

10. September 2007 um 03:36 7 Kommentare

For Connotea there was published „Entity Describer“ (ED), an add-on tool that allows taggers to select terms from a controlled vocabulary such as MeSH. Background information can be found in the blog of its developer Benjamin Good. Up to now Entity Describer can only be used via a Greasemonkey script. [via Catalogoblog and netbib]

I bet soon there will be more tagging applications that support controlled vocabularies. For instance Sarah Hayman and Nick Lothian plan to extend the Education Network Australia (edna) with – how they call it – taxonomy-directed folksonomy. See their IFLA-Paper (that Patrick pointed me to) for more information.

Benjamin Good also wrote a paper about his work on ED and published it on his blog before even recieving reviewers comments. I like the following discussion on whether and how to publish it – a nice example of the changes in academic publishing. Now the paper is best available as preprint, identified with hdl:10101/npre.2007.945.1 and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License (!). Thanks Benjamin and thanks to Nature for making this possible!

I already cited the work in an ongoing discussion about the Wikipedia-Article „Folksonomy. The discussion is mostly about words and I hate it. Good et al also contribute in confusion: Why do they have to introduce a new term („Semantic annotation means the association of a data entity with an element from a classification scheme“) instead of using existing vocabulary? A look at my typology of tagging systems could help clarification.

Well… or maybe tagging researchers just like to add synonyms and polysems because they are so used to them – a folksonomy will emerge anyhow so just call it how you like… 🙁